A bomb has exploded at a Hindu shrine in central Bangkok, killing at least 18 people and wounding scores more.

Body parts and mangled scooters were scattered across the street after the explosion at about 7pm local time (12noon GMT) at the Erawan shrine in the central Chidlom district of the Thai capital.

At least 10 Thais, one Chinese and one Filipino citizen are among the 18 dead, according to the national police chief Somyot Poompanmuang, who called the perpetrators of the attack “cruel” for targeting a religious shrine at a busy period.

“Those who have planted this bomb are cruel,” said Poompanmuang. “They aim to kill because everyone knows that at 7pm the shrine is crowded with Thais and foreigners. Planting a bomb there means they want to see a lot of dead people.”

A potential second device that sparked a security alert was found to be harmless, police said.

Dozens of ambulances were at the scene and a nearby metro station was closed. Medics and police formed a line at the large intersection and walked slowly forward, looking for any debris from the blast.

At least 18 people were confirmed dead and 117 injured, according to the Narinthorn emergency medical rescue centre.

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The explosion – which Poompanmuang said was a pipe bomb – was large enough to throw a metre-wide chunk of metal to a third-floor balcony on the other side of the street, about 50 metres away. Human body parts lay on the road and medics were still picking them up two hours after the blast.

“It was a bomb; I think it was inside a motorcycle … it was very big, look at the bodies,” one shocked rescue volunteer, who did not want to be named, told AFP.

One medic at the scene told the Guardian: “Some people died here, some people died at hospital.” He said he had arrived shortly after the blast and was waiting to be of assistance.

Thanapon Peng, 25, passed the site on a motorbike taxi moments after the blast.

“I saw glass. I saw some organs of people on the road. I don’t know how many people there were,” he told the Guardian in the lobby of the Grand Hyatt hotel, where tourists and Thai people have been waiting until they are told it is safe to leave.

“I heard that about 80 people are wounded but we don’t know how many died.”

Police with torches have been looking under bushes and walking the grounds of the nearby police station in an apparent search for other bombs.

A long line of ambulances has formed outside a hospital located close to the blast site. Many of the injured are being taken to medical centres further away.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Thai forces are fighting a low-level Muslim insurgency in the south of the predominantly Buddhist country, although those rebels have rarely launched attacks outside their ethnic Malay heartland.

The Nation TV channel quoted the Thai prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, as saying the government would set up a “war room” to coordinate its response.

The defence minister, Prawit Wongsuwan, told Reuters that “the perpetrators intended to destroy the economy and tourism”.

The country has also been riven for a decade by intense and sometimes violent rivalry between political factions in Bangkok and elsewhere.

Bangkok rescuers attempt to reach survivors of the shrine bombing

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The army has ruled Thailand since May 2014, when it ousted an elected government after months of, at times, violent anti-government protests.

The Erawan shrine, on a busy corner near top hotels, shopping centres and offices, is a major tourist attraction, especially for visitors from east Asia. Many Thai people worship there.

The shrine intersection was the site of months of anti-government protests in 2010 by supporters of the ousted former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra. Dozens were killed in a military crackdown and a shopping centre was set ablaze.

(The Guardian)

Agence France-Presse and Reuters contributed to this report

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UN aid chief 'horrified' by attacks on civilians in Syria

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) — The United Nations humanitarian chief said on Monday he is "horrified" by the attacks on civilians taking place in Syria, singling out in particular government airstrikes the previous day that killed nearly 100 people in a Damascus suburb.

The protracted conflict not only "severely affects" the lives of millions of people in Syria but also threatens the stability of the entire region, Stephen O'Brien said at a press conference in Damascus.

The stark warning comes amid a surge in violence as Syrian government troops, Islamic militants and rebels carried out attacks that killed and wounded dozens Monday, including in President Bashar Assad's coastal stronghold of Latakia.

"Attacks on civilians are unlawful, unacceptable and must stop," O'Brien said, speaking at the end of a three-day visit to Syria, during which he met senior officials and visited the central province of Homs.

Government air raids on Sunday killed at least 96 people in the eastern Damascus suburb of Douma, making it one of the deadliest single incidents since the crisis began in March 2011. The airstrikes hit a vegetable market in the suburb, which is a stronghold of the Islam Army rebel group.

Syria's conflict has killed more than 250,000 people, according to United Nations.

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"I am particularly appalled by reports of airstrikes yesterday, causing scores of civilian deaths and hundreds injured, right in the center of Douma," O'Brien said. "I am horrified by the total disrespect for civilian life in this conflict."

He appealed to all parties to protect civilians and respect international humanitarian law, and also expressed concerns for 4.6 million Syrian "stuck in hard-to-reach and besieged areas."

O'Brien also lambasted armed groups for cutting off water in Damascus, saying it was unacceptable to "use access to water and other services as a weapon of war."

Water cuts have been used before in the Syrian civil war, with Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo, Syria's largest city and former commercial center, most affected.

In Washington, State Department spokesman John Kirby said the United States "condemns in the strongest possible terms the Assad regime's deadly airstrikes" on the Douma market.

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"The Assad regime's brutal attacks on Syria's cities have killed thousands of people and destroyed schools, mosques, markets, and hospitals," Kirby said, adding that they "demonstrate the regime's disregard for human life."

U.N. special envoy Staffan de Mistura also condemned the Douma airstrikes.

"Hitting crowded civilian markets (and) killing almost one hundred of its own citizens by a government is unacceptable in any circumstances," de Mistura said, repeating calls for the warring sides to urgently start a dialogue toward a political solution.

Also Monday, the rebels in Damascus' wider eastern suburbs — an area known as Eastern Ghouta — imposed a curfew, fearing more government airstrikes and saying the curfew was imposed out of concern for civilian lives. The rebel statement said the curfew would go on until further notice. Douma is part of Eastern Ghouta.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 22 air raids on Eastern Ghouta on Monday, including seven in Douma. The Local Coordination Committees said Douma was hit with mortar shells.

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Douma-based activist Baraa Abdul-Rahman said the streets there were empty and most people were staying indoors. "There is a situation of terror and fear in the town," he said via Skype.

In Turkey, the head of the main Western-backed opposition group, the Syrian National Coalition, blasted the government over Douma's air raids and urged the international community to help bring officials behind the "massacres and war crimes" to the International Criminal Court.

"Any talk about political and peaceful solution to the Syrian conflict in light of the daily and systematic regime massacres ... is meaningless," said the coalitions' Khaled Khoja.

Syria's Minister of Justice Najm El-Deen Ahmad, meanwhile, told The Associated Press that the authorities are not worried about any criminal charges against them at the ICC.

"It is the criminals who should be worried, and we have the evidence that could prove their involvement," he said, referring to the opposition.

Ahmad accused Turkey of setting up camps for training gunmen who later crossed into Syria to kill and plunder Syrian factories, and added that his ministry is preparing to file lawsuits against Turkey within a few months, both in local and international courts.

Syrian state TV reported that attackers shelled the government-held neighborhood of Hamadaniyeh in Aleppo, killing 10 and wounding 17 on Monday. The TV also reported rebel shelling of the coastal city of Latakia, which killed six and wounded 19.

___

Mroue reported from Beirut. Associated Press writer Bradley Klapper in Washington contributed to this report.

Moscow (AFP) - Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Monday insisted Moscow did not accept the departure of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as a prerequisite for launching any peace process in the war-torn country.

Russia -- one of Assad's few remaining allies along with Iran -- has launched a fresh diplomatic push to find a way out of the four-year civil war that has cost some 240,000 lives.

Russia's top diplomat met his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Moscow on Monday to discuss Syria along with other issues including the July deal over Tehran's nuclear programme.

The visit came after Lavrov last week hosted Saudi Arabia's foreign minister and representatives of the Syrian opposition, who all insisted Assad must go.

"While some of our partners believe that it is necessary to agree in advance that at the end of the transitional period the president will leave his post, this position is unacceptable for Russia," Lavrov said after meeting Zarif, without specifying who he was talking about.

Lavrov said Russia's position "has not changed" on Syria and a solution to the conflict should come "without outside interference or any kinds of preconditions".

Moscow is also pushing a plan for a broader grouping than the current US-led coalition to fight the Islamic State (IS) group, to include Syria's government and its allies, but Assad's opponents have rejected the idea.

The head of Syria's main opposition National Coalition group Khaled Khoja claimed Friday after meeting Lavrov that Moscow is "not clinging to Bashar al-Assad".

Russian officials insisted Moscow's position all along was not to support him personally but back him as "the legitimately elected president."

The opposition believes that Assad must step down immediately for there to be any hope of reconciliation.

Amid the diplomatic flurry, the atrocious situation on the ground in Syria took a further grim turn over the weekend as regime airstrikes in a rebel-held town outside Damascus killed nearly 100.

The United Nation's Syria envoy, Staffan de Mistura, on Monday condemned the bombings as "unacceptable".

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At Least 87 Wildfires Burn Out West

By Laura Zuckerman

SALMON, Idaho (Reuters) - The U.S. Army mobilized soldiers on Monday to reinforce civilian firefighters stretched thin by dozens of major wildfires roaring largely unchecked across the West, with more than 100 homes reduced to ruins in several states.

The 200 troops deployed from Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Washington, are to be organized into 10 firefighting crews of 20 each, all of whom will be sent to a single fire yet to be determined, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

Fire managers requested the mobilization - the first of its kind since 2006 - as crews from federal, state and local agencies struggled to contain many of the wildfires that have charred more than 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of the West amid a heat wave gripping the drought-parched region.

More than 29,000 civilian fire personnel already were deployed throughout the West, most of them on front-line ground crews. Property losses were concentrated in Idaho, Oregon and Washington, with 108 homes confirmed as destroyed among those three states alone since Friday, authorities said.

Among the areas hardest hit was northern Idaho, where an elderly evacuee was killed and at least 50 homes were leveled by a cluster of fires that have raged along the Clearwater River in and around the Nez Perce Indian Reservation since last week.

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Firefighters prepare to battle the Wolverine wildfire near Chelan, Washington, in this U.S. Forest S …

The so-called Clearwater Complex of fires has scorched more than 50,000 acres (20,000 hectares) of timber and brush and prompted the evacuation of more than 100 homes from the vicinity of the logging towns of Orofino and Kamiah, authorities said.

The fatality was identified as Cheryl Wissler, 70, who was trying to secure her backyard chickens before fleeing with her husband when she fell and hit her head, according to Idaho County Sheriff Doug Giddings.

Two nights later, loggers and farmers came to the assistance of volunteer firefighters battling to save property and livestock in Kamiah and surrounding communities.

"I saw guys, just farmers and ranchers who'd come in from other towns to help, running through flames to cut open barbed-wire fences and opening barns to let animals out," Undersheriff Jim Gorges said.

'STRETCHED VERY, VERY THIN'

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He was part of an ad-hoc team who rode to the rescue on all-terrain vehicles, a motorized raft and other equipment on Sunday to evacuate several firefighters trapped between the banks of the Clearwater River and encroaching flames, Gorges said.

The extent of strained manpower was also evident as fire managers for the blaze ordered reinforcements of ground crews and aircraft on Monday, only to see their requests returned for a third straight day marked, "UTF," for "unable to fill," said Ryan Greendeer, a spokesman for the Clearwater command.

"Our resources are stretched very, very thin," he said. "Each incident is having to make do with what is available, not what's needed."

The Clearwater was one of 14 major wildfires burning across Idaho and one of about 95 tallied in seven Western states, the bulk of them in Washington, Oregon, Montana and California, the Interagency Fire Center said. Little if any containment had been achieved on many of those blazes on Monday, the agency reported.

The Pacific Northwest states of Oregon and Washington tallied more than 30 large conflagrations together and some of the highest property losses.

A cluster of wildfires dubbed the Canyon Creek Complex in central Oregon destroyed 26 dwellings over the weekend and continued to threaten hundreds of other structures on Monday, authorities said.

At least 32 homes were leveled by a separate series of fires burning in north-central Washington state on the outskirts of Chelan, a resort town at the southern tip of Lake Chelan, the state's largest natural lake, a sheriff's spokesman said.

The spokesman, Rich Magnussen, said the toll of property losses there was likely to climb as fire teams reached areas that were still burning on Monday.

(Additional reporting by Courtney Sherwood from Portland, Oregon; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman from Los Angeles; Editing by Sandra Maler)